Located just off the park’s central avenue, Kadriorg Palace (Kadrioru loss) is a late-Baroque residence designed by the Italian architect Niccolo Michetti to provide Empress Catherine with a comfy Baltic pad. These days the palace’s opulent staterooms accommodate the Kadriorg Art Museum (Kadrioru kunstimuuseum), an impressive collection of European painting and sculpture over the centuries.

The display opens on an exuberant note with Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s small-scale Wedding Feast, followed by a room of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes – the glistening, ready-to-eat surface of Hans van Essen’s Still Life with Lobster being an obvious highlight.

The Main Hall of the palace is an artwork in its own right, with chunky fireplaces topped by trumpet-blowing angels and two-headed eagles. A central ceiling painting illustrates the legend of Diana and Actaeon, in which the latter is transformed into a stag for having surprised Diana while bathing, and is hunted and killed by his dogs (Diana here represents the Russian Empire of Peter the Great, Actaeon the impudent and over-ambitious Swedish king, Charles XII). The adjoining lime-green Banqueting Hall is in fact a large conservatory tacked on in the 1930s, packed with soft furnishings and plants.